A paper on journalists’ professional views and gender in 18 countries, co-authored by Thomas Hanitzsch and myself, has just been published in the European Journal of Communication. It is based on the first wave of the Worlds of Journalism Study, an international collaborative project that tracks journalists’ views around the globe. This particular paper is interested in finding out whether gender really does make a differences in journalists’ role perceptions. The abstract states:

Research into journalism and gender to date has found somewhat contradictory evidence as to the ways in which women and men practice journalism. Some scholars claim that women have inherently different concepts and practices of journalism and that this has led to a feminization of journalism, others have found little evidence to suggest that men and women differ significantly in terms of their role conceptions. While numerous studies have been conducted into this issue around the world, few have taken a truly comparative approach. This article presents results from a large-scale comparative survey into gender differences in journalists’ professional views in 18 countries around the world. Results suggest that women and men do not differ in any meaningful ways in their role conceptions on either the individual level or in newsrooms dominated by women, or in sociocultural contexts where women have achieved a certain level of empowerment.